Social Security: Americans Agree VIDEO

Social Security: Just the Facts Video

COVERED: a week-by-week look at the political and legislative developments that led to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid 50 years ago. Bob Rosenblatt, Academy senior fellow and former Los Angeles Times Washington correspondent will report on the people and the maneuvers that led to this major expansion of social insurance.

Heidi Hartmann

Co-Chair of New Caregiving Study Panel, IWPR President, and Research Professor

Heidi Hartmann is co-chair of the Academy’s new study panel on long-term care and family care. For 30 years, Hartmann has been the President and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C. She is also a Research Professor at the George Washington University and serves as the Editor of the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. Hartmann’s areas of expertise include: family and medical leave, poverty and the social safety net, social security, equal pay, and civic and political engagement as they impact the lives of girls and women.

Hartmann began her career working as a visiting assistant professor at the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research and then moved to Washington, DC, to work as an economist at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Hartmann then served as a researcher and Associate Executive Director of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academy of Sciences before founding IWPR. She is also a former faculty member of Rutgers University where she directed the women’s studies program. Hartmann received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1994 for her research in the area of women and economics. In 2014 she was named a Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and in 2017 she received the Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology from the American Sociological Association.

Hartmann received a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College and MPhil and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Yale University. Hartmann also received honorary degrees from Swarthmore College and Claremont Graduate University.

“If Heidi Hartmann ever deviated from the goal of improving the lives of women and children in America, she kept it to herself,” said fellow Academy member Sara Rix, Senior Strategic Policy Advisor in economics for the AARP Public Policy Institute. “Her tireless work on behalf of women—the rigorous research that was hard to refute, the mentoring of young people, the ability to articulate what we as a society needed to do and the courage to tell us—has spanned decades and finds us all better off because of it.”

Hartmann is the co-author of IWPR’s inaugural publication, Unnecessary Losses: Costs to Americans of the Lack of Family and Medical Leave. This research and her Congressional testimony informed the passage of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, which has become a cornerstone of U.S. employment law and human resource policy.